September 26, 2008

I got a phone call from Verizon Wireless. They called with an automated response system saying that they were sorry they could not speak with me personally but that I should get in touch with them right away. Naturally, I assumed that there was some problem with my account.

I called them and was put in queue for 15 minutes. When they finally spoke with me they thanked me for being such a good customer. They went on and on about me being a good customer so I asked them if there were some problem and they said no, they were calling me to thank me for being a good customer.

So I spent 20 minutes on nothing. 20 minutes lost for them to thank me. Sometimes, the best way to say thanks is to say nothing. We expect a service provider to silently, efficiently and reliably do what we ask - no more.

At Veotag, we try to help our customers when they need help. But I don't think we will be calling them with ARS (Automated Response Systems) to thank them for watching our videos!

September 09, 2008

I tried Google's new Chrome browser and it worked quite well except for a few glitches. I went in to talk to our programming staff about it and they pointed out that it collects your personal information. Unbelievable! Think about the level of invasiveness that is involved in your browser collecting personal information.

There are many things wrong with this. First, it is unlikely that the folks at Google developed Chrome without looking at the public domain browser software. So that means that a lot of the IP is based on publicly donated work and effort. Second, this violates a basic trust issue that you have with this class of software. Imagine if Microsoft made Word collect your personal information. It (Microsoft) could then sell the information it gets to the highest bidder. For example, it could look at what you are doing and determine who would pay to get some salacious details. Or, if it were important formulae, it could sell it to your competition.

There has to be a boundary where this stops. I cannot afford this level of Corporate Spying. Can you?

July 16, 2008

When we choose our life's paths we do it for many reasons: we might want to help people, we might want to make money, we might want fame, the list goes on and on. I recall playing a game as a child where you chose either happiness, fame, wealth and one other quality. But still, these are games and in the practical case, we are seldom presented with opportunities to do things that matter. I can say, for myself, that we started Veotag because we thought that the ability to reach into an Audio or a Video and "see" through the table of contents what it contained would be something important - we felt it mattered.

Recently, I saw another product that I think matters. That product is the LifeStraw. This product allows people to drink water in the Third World that is polluted, may have terrible bacteria that cause cause epidemics and drink that water safely. The straw acts as a filter and removes what cannot be drunk. This will be a life-saving thing for a large class of people. This is a thing that matters and I applaud their efforts.

December 19, 2007

Veotag has a new marketing manager named Robert Savette. He is going to be working with us to improve the way we state our value on the website. We are also going to be announcing several key partnerships and partner programs over the next few months. Expect the first such announcement in January.

December 14, 2007

Lots of great things are happening with Veotag. We were chosen as a way of delivering added value to Reuter's Hedgeworld website for their long format videos for Ernst & Young. You can see that here . You will see that these videos all show the customized player set up for this client.

With our in house design team, we are able to develop these customized players very quickly. The entire project, including compliance took only a few days. The tagging and customized player took only a day.

September 25, 2007

For those of you who do not follow baseball, the Yankees have a new pitcher Joba Chamberlain who has done a tremendous job as a relief pitcher. When he was introduced in the middle of the year, the coaches explained a series of complicated rules that would be used to "develop" this young star.

The rules were something like:

If he pitches one inning one day, he cannot pitch the next day.

If he pitches two innings one day, he cannot pitch the next 2 days.

He will not start in the middle of an inning.

He will appear only as a relief pitcher.

There were more rules, but you get the point. For the most part, the rules have been obeyed and the fans and the opponents have known what to expect.

Just the other day, the Yankees decided to break rule 3.

Now think ahead to the World Series. The opponents have a set of expectations about this young phenom. Imagine, if in game 7, the Yanks announce that pitcher X will start and on the day, who walks onto the mound but Joba! It would be a tremendous psychological advantage.

This post is about framing one's message. The way that one describes something that someone sees has as much or more value than the thing being observed. Sometimes the explanation will appear to contradict what one sees because the information in a movement or an activity is hidden until someone points it out.

This is the power of Veotag. We add intelligence to media and give the opportunity to frame the message.

September 06, 2007

This is another step forward for the Hugo Chavez government and I can see that Venezuela is going to leave the US in the dust when it comes to progressive social policy. What brilliance!

I expect that this thinking will be echoed and improved upon by other nations. Think of the simplicity if a nation were to suddenly restrict the names to only boy and girl. Then you would never need to know a person's name at all. Of course, for people who were dressed in concealing clothing you might have the possibility of mislabeling them and committing a horrible gaffe.

It does create a problem though if you have only 2 names. What do you do with someone who is cross-gender or hermaphroditic? You might have to expand the scope of language to admit a third possibility.

If you are a fan of Greek philosophy, you may see that this argument leads to the need for quite a few names. The argument would be, if A and B do not describe C then you need to add C to the set. If A,B,C do not describe D, then you need to add D to the set. Hence, the need for a large set of names.

In fact, Philosophy, as a study, spends much of its time on classification. It develops a large set of names and attempts to use the syntatic use of the elements to precisely describe what is going on. An attempt to restrict the name space will lead to only to the use of binary (or n-ary) representations where new things are described entirely by joining together known items. (This is the basic of computer representation where everything is described entirely by 1's and 0's).

What does this have to do with Veotag?

Today, tagging technology is restricted to the use of single keywords or phrases. Most tags today are around the outside of a video, not inside it. The Veotag technology allows people to tag the inside of a video and then a user can do a visual scan of the video to see what is inside. The tags are exported to the major search engines so you can go from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. and jump right into the video to the part that interests you.

The next step up from this syntactic tagging is semantic tagging. Some activities have restricted vocabularies. Sports is one such example. In a baseball game, or a football game, the language that one uses to describe what is happening is restricted. Veotag is releasing a product at the end of the year which takes advantage of this.

When you can talk in a restricted domain about what is going on, like "what percentage of the time on 3rd and goal will my opponent make an end run?" you can learn new things from you media assets. The act of tagging will by itself create a statistical database.

Veotag will provide the ability to define a domain of interest and start to gather restricted information on it first for sports and then for general consumption. We are looking for partners in the knowledge space and domain experts who would like to use this technology to help their customers and/or employees learn more from their video (and audio) assets.

June 28, 2007

I manage the website for my wife who does photography. I recently received the following (scam) email:

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Hello,We own the .COM version of your domain name jillrhodes.biz

We would like to offer you the chance to purchase the domain name.

Our internal valuations suggest this domain will sell for $400 to $500 but as you own the domain in a different extension we can sell the domain to you for only $195.

Let me know if you would like to go ahead with the purchase.

Thank youRecap Domains

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This was all great except that they did not own the domain they claimed to own. I registered it and my wife can continue to do the portraits of children without paying someone to sell her something they do not own!

Be on the lookout for people selling you domains - they may be scam artists.

June 21, 2007

Recently, click.tv turned off its service. I, for one, was sorry to see them go. You may find it odd that I would be sad to lose competition but there really is a precedent for it.

Before I talk about the precedent, I would like to say that there were 3 main competitors in this space at the outset: click.tv, MotionBox and Veotag. Of these, click.tv and Veotag were doing text based tables of contents for a video and MotionBox was (and is) doing a pictorial representation of the contents. I have met with the 2 founders of these two companies, Mike Lanza (formerly of click.tv) and Chris O'Brian of MotionBox. Both of them are smart and gentlemanly and it was good to be in their company.

I regret the loss of click.tv in the marketplace because they had an interesting product that should have been useful to some. Naturally, I hope that their customers will come to Veotag to get the service that they lost from click.tv.

But there is a wider loss that occurs when one loses good competition. It happened to survivors of great wars. For soldiers who fought bitterly against good opponents they felt a loss when their greatest rivals died. There is a loss related to those we struggle against. And it is a personal one which is incomprehensible to those who observe from the outside soldiers mourning the loss of the enemy.

I do not dance on the graves of those who lost here. I pay respect to the efforts of click.tv and I hope Mike Lanza and his team will find a good future.